Monument Bank Plans Retail Tokenised Deposits as Wall Street Stays Institutional

JPMorgan and Citi have built substantial blockchain infrastructure for payments, but their tokenised money services stop well short of ordinary depositors. JPMorgan’s Kinexys platform moves more than three trillion dollars, and Citi Token Services handles billions in cross-border payments daily; yet both remain confined to permissioned, institutional networks. Monument Bank, a United Kingdom challenger bank with roughly a 2.4 billion dollar balance sheet, is positioning itself to fill that gap by tokenising up to 250 million pounds of interest-bearing retail deposits on the Midnight blockchain, using zero-knowledge proofs to reconcile customer privacy with regulatory requirements.

The structural reason for the institutional bias is not indifference toward retail clients but the difficulty of connecting private bank blockchains to external networks without leaking sensitive commercial data. Fahmi Syed, President of the Midnight Foundation, argues that bridging separate private ledgers introduces data leakage at every connection point, a problem that public blockchains with programmable privacy are designed to address. Monument’s founder Mintoo Bhandari frames the large banks’ internal tokenisation projects as genuine progress on legacy infrastructure that in many cases dates to the 1970s, while questioning whether those projects move the needle for the average savings-account holder.

Liquidity fragmentation adds a second layer of friction. Jerald David, CEO of Lynq Network, describes treasury desks running three parallel systems for the same underlying job, with idle liquidity locked across multiple networks simultaneously. A tokenised deposit differs from a stablecoin in that it remains a direct claim on a licensed bank, can carry interest, and sits inside the regulated banking perimeter, which is precisely why Monument sees its banking licence as a competitive differentiator. Whether that model can deliver programmatic settlement, privacy, and retail yield at scale remains the open question as the project moves toward execution.